Reading Apprenticeship at WestEd

Today’s secondary and college students need strong literacy skills, subject-area knowledge, self-direction, and curiosity to succeed. Reading Apprenticeship opens opportunities for all students, giving them new ways of reading, writing, thinking, talking, and reasoning in supportive classroom environments. Teachers using the Reading Apprenticeship approach learn to model discipline-specific literacy skills and establish routines for discussion and collaboration that tap students’ own experiences. The Reading Apprenticeship approach is based on a unique framework of four interacting dimensions of learning that support both academic and social-emotional learning: social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building. These four dimensions are integrated into subject-area teaching and developed through metacognitive conversation that explores students’ thinking processes. Students think and talk about how they learn as well as what they learn. This collaborative work takes place within the context of extensive reading — increased in-class opportunities for students to practice reading in more skillful ways.